We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.

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Thursday, June 26. 2014

IQ is always an interesting topic. Ashkenazi Jews and Asians have the highest average IQs, and IQ testing correlates well with the SAT tests.

How genetic is it, and how moveable is it? Those are always studied and always in dispute. I always enjoy the company of people with higher IQs than mine, just as I enjoy playing tennis with more talented players.

How important is life "success" and life happiness to IQ? Not very much, I think, unless one aspires to being a Physics or Math genius. IQ is just one factor in a human personality but it is one, like height, which is readily apparent.

Newton’s wrong guesses are, however, as interesting as his correct ones. A well-known example is his conviction that light is made of particles, not waves. What he had in mind were solid ‘corpuscles’, not the photons of modern physics, but it’s still tempting to see him as having been half right. And in trying to explain the splitting of white light into a spectrum, he came up with the beautiful notion that the width of the coloured bands matches the mathematical proportions of a musical scale. People had traditionally counted no more than five colours in a rainbow, but for his theory to work Newton needed more, so he introduced two ‘semitones’, orange and indigo, and we’ve been counting seven colours in a rainbow ever since. Generations of schoolchildren have learned mnemonics that colour-code light, such as ‘Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain’, which have as much to do with physical reality as the signs of the zodiac.

“How should we do x?” The main problem is not the answer, but the question itself, and the assumptions behind that question, the belief that an answer exists.

Some policies must, by their nature, be implemented at the national level. If you’re going to have a sovereign nation-state, you need a national defense apparatus (which is not to say you need our national-defense apparatus; there are alternatives), and you probably need a national immigration policy, etc. The basic architecture of the current American constitutional order, which is a remarkably wise and intelligent piece of work, contemplates national policies in those areas in which the several states interact with foreign powers and in those cases in which the states cannot coordinate efforts or resolve disputes among themselves on their own. That, along with some 18th-century anachronisms (post roads, etc.) and some awful economic superstitions (political management of trade, a political monopoly on the issuance of currency), constitutes most of what the federal government is in theory there to do. That and fighting pirates and others committing “felonies on the high seas,” of course, which is awesome, and we can all feel patriotic about fighting pirates.

But . . . if we look at federal programs by budget share, almost nothing that Washington does requires a national policy. There’s national defense, of course, at around 20 percent of spending; you may believe, as I do, that that number is probably too high, but national defense is a legitimate national endeavor. But most federal spending is on various entitlement programs — Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and various other welfare benefits. There is not much reason for any of these programs to exist at all — government is a criminally inept pension planner and a thoroughly incompetent insurance company — and there is very little reason for any of them to exist as uniform, one-size-fits-all national programs. Start digging into that non-defense discretionary spending and you end up with very little more than a catalog of crony payoffs and political favoritissm.

There is no more reason to believe that a single government-run pension scheme is in each individual’s best interest than to believe that a single city or single model of car is right for everybody. And the people who design and plan these programs know that. The point of Social Security — like the point of insisting that health insurance is “a right” rather than a consumer good — is to redefine the relationship between citizen and state. That is the real rationale for a national pension scheme or a national insurance policy. For several generations now, we’ve been changing the very idea of what it means to be an American citizen. It used to mean being entitled to enjoy liberty and republican self-governance under the Constitution. Eventually, it came to mean being eligible for Social Security, functionally if not formally. Now it means being eligible for Obamacare. The name of the project may change every generation, and its totems may evolve from Bismarck to Marx to “the experts” — that legion of pointy-headed Caesars who are to be the final authority in all matters in dispute — but the dream remains the same: society as one big factory under the management of enlightened men with extraordinary powers of compulsion.

Bravo to him. I hate Washington with the aggrandizing, pre-fascist pseudo-Roman pretensions of that town, as if it were an imperial city with its statues, monuments, pillars, and memorials imitating ancient Rome. I hate the idea of a luxurious presidential mansion. I hate the pomp, the parties, and all of the government limos. I hate all the money that flows through there, tax dollars, lobbying dollars, legal dollars. I hate the idea of a "national art gallery" and a national theater and all those sorts of imperial trappings. I hate those giant buildings filled with bureaucrats with power over me. I hate the amount of power which is ensconced there. I think all of the grandiosity and money and power and scheming and careerism and celebrity is disgusting and un-American.

I even dislike Arlington cemetery. Those boys and men should be buried at home with their families, in my opinion.

George Washington would have hated his monument, and Lincoln would hate his. Those were humble men, not seeking idolization.

Mead: The Jihadi Menace Gets Real - ISIS is bigger, badder, richer, and better organized than any jihadi threat the United States has faced thus far. Its rise represents a foreign policy disaster of the first order.

Of all the cities in the nation, Washington, D.C., with its immediate environs, is the deepest in historical importance. The grotesquely sacrilegious monuments, the puerile exhibits within the museums, the ostentatiously-built neoclassical bureaucratic monstrosities—most of the District is a tribute to its own history of aggrandizement. It’s only in the little places, far removed from the shadows of the Lincoln and Washington apotheoses, that real moments of lasting impression are made. The swaps of journalistic scoops in classy restaurants, the sexual quid pro quos that either enhance or destroy careers, the backroom deal-making to ensure reelections; these ephemeral events end up defining the rooms, hallways, tables, and meeting spaces we normally take for granted.

Things are changing fast: Fast Times in Higher Ed. I believe that the old late-medieval model, designed for dedicated scholars, will survive but in small, elite places. It was never meant to be mass market.

Sunday, June 22. 2014

It's the job of the press to hold everybody's feet to the fire, and to carry nobody's water (to the fire, as it were). The American press had a reputation for fearless pursuit of the truth, once upon a time. Or maybe that's a myth. Still, as the MSM has turned Progressive-partisan over the past 40 years or so (thus resulting in the emergence Conservative radio, FOX, etc), press fearlessness is gone.

In Watergate, we were outraged that Nixon ordered the IRS to go after political foes — even though the IRS refused to do his bidding. A Nixon ally was forced to whine that the IRS was controlled by Democrats.There was evidently little or no evidence that IRS power was abused, because the second Article of Impeachment against Nixon charged merely that he “endeavored” to sic the IRS on enemies.

In the Obama administration, on the other hand, we know that the IRS went after political foes. We don’t know whether the president was involved, but if Nixon’s IRS had targeted liberals because it believed it had an implicit go-ahead from the boss, wouldn’t that be fairly disturbing also? Would a breezy dismissal from Nixon make you feel better?

... no matter what establishment voices assert intervention in foreign lands in a ham-handed fashion to prop up our American values is bound to lead us down a path of tears. As Shadi Hamid states the future of democracy in the Middle East is going to be illiberal. This may be inevitable. We don’t need to avert our eyes from it, and we need to acknowledge that so we were, so they will be. It took the Thirty Years war to finally purge the enthusiasm of sectarianism from the cultural DNA of Europeans (and even then, religious minorities were second class citizens for centuries). There will be no calm reasoning with Iraqis of any stripe because the march of history continues, and only sadness can convince all parties that moderation is necessary for the existence of modern nation-states. Intervention in some fashion may be inevitable in the world, but our goal should be to prevent hell, not to create heaven on earth. The former is possible, the latter is not.

Actively-managed equity accounts are widely considered a rip-off for the muppets. I am not rich enough to get into hedge funds, but I'd like to be because those smart folks can do far more than I can, hedging currencies, national economies, sovereign debt, etc. while the average Joe like me is stuck with mass market retail products.

I like to have money, and enjoy the concept of making money in markets while busy at my day job. I keep spare cash in a Vanguard bond fund, while my IRA is miscellaneous but mostly Vanguard funds with a focus on proven income-producing equities and some balanced funds plus some good (legal, of course) stock tips, and some cash for the next market crash, locked and loaded. I control my IRA.

I also have substantial debt in the form of a low-interest but fairly large mortgage which I intend to keep as long as I am able to work. As I have calculated it, keeping a mortgage is a net gain for me.

Most people want capital-preservation above all, but if you want risk to make real money in markets, do what monkeys do and use your crystal ball and pick the right stocks instead of indexes indices and buy low, sell high. After all, funds dilute gains. So hire a monkey.

What do y'all do with your spare cash and with your long-term savings?